Is it easier to write for badguys for you?

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PulpHero

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I've been slowly working on a story for about a year now which includes a flawed hero and a somewhat noble villain.

I actually had to reboot and rethink my story recently because I discovered I was writing more about the villain than the hero. The hero was meant to be emotionally flawed and self centered for most of the story, but eventually he learns to change and turn around his motivations. But I was having so much fun writing the villain as chasing him, that I kept pushing the hero's turnaround back, and eventually I had an emotionally oppressed, badass villain looking for redemption versus a hero that went past "anti-hero" and straight into "asshole" territory.

Anyone else like writing more for badguys than goodguys?
 
Sometimes, yeah. Villians often have the advantage of being unambiguous in their motivations. They want what they want and they want it now. Modern heroes, on the other hand, need to be three-dimentional, and creating a fully-realized character on paper is no easy task.

So, villains are usually more fun to write.
 
It sounds to me that your villain is the hero, and the hero is the villain. Instead of trying to focus on a character that interests you less, perhaps you should change your direction? If you're going to care less about your hero than you do your villain, it will undoubtedly show through your writing, thus making the reader not care as much about your hero. In other words: if you don't care about your hero, why would the reader?

I enjoy my villains as much as I enjoy my heroes. They're all my little text children fighting for the second serving of chicken.
 
Which I prefer to write really does depend on the personality of the character. I have good guys that I can write and enjoy and I have bad ones that I do as well. I think the more cookie-cutter-esque the good or bad guy is the less I want to write them and the harder it is for me to write them. This makes it rather difficult because when it comes to good guys there is a limited range of what their reactions to certain situations can be. Because they are the good guy they are expected to take the 'high road' where as a bad guy has more freedom. A bad guy can do good things and a bad guy can do a whole slew of bad things. It's possible for a good guy to do a few bad things but again it is highly limited because he must be redeemable to the audience. The motivation hast to be believable and you risk losing reader faith in him if he gets too out of control.
 
Bad guys are easier to write. Years ago, I was reading a book on drawing, and the writer said that it was easier to draw distorted, unnatural figures--including grotesques--than normal, healthy people. Twisted, scary-looking trees than healthy trees in a healthy forest. At the time I was struggling to draw humans better, so I tried skewing the figure towards the grotesque...and it WAS easier. (Not claiming it was good grotesque, just that it no longer looked like a failed attempt to draw an attractive and realistic human figure.)

Much the same applies with characters. The bad guy--stereotypical or not--requires only exaggeration of qualities that you-the-writer think are bad. The bad guy is worse than you, in other words. (There's the additional frisson of pleasure at releasing your own dark side into the character.) So it's fun, and it's relatively easy.

Good guys require you to connect with your own, and others', better motivations, and writing someone better than yourself without making the character all too perfect requires more skill than writing a good villain. When I wrote stories as a kid, I ran into this problem all the time--the Sheriff of Nottingham was a nice juicy character with easily understood motivations, but why would Robin Hood hang out in the woods in the cold and wet with a bunch of other losers? When I wrote villains, they were fun--smash & grab, bellow & strut, and so on. Heroes...even at ten and eleven I knew my heroes were sentimental, overwrought, noble and brave and self-sacrificing and (since I wasn't) I couldn't figure out what in them created their motivations.

I totally did not get doing the right thing for the wrong reason, or the wrong thing for the right reason, or the complexity of human motivation at that age. Right and wrong I understood in the usual binary child form.

But in the case you're describing, I agree with Tim Seraphim...the character you fall in love with (so to speak) is your protagonist. (Think protagonist and not hero and it may be easier.) You like him...so tell HIS story. Whether he ends up finding redemption or not, he's the one speaking to you.
 
So is Much the Miller's Son or Alan a Dale the bigger forest dwelling loser? I vote Much. :D

Getting inside a villain's mind is extremely entertaining. They see things differently. Good and evil is an entirely skewed concept. I get kicks out of making bad guys who think they're good. They think they're right. They're arrogant and full of themselves. I also dig extremely flawed heroes. Heroes that are essentially criminals. Heroes, who by most opinions, would be seen as villains are very interesting.

So meandering my thoughts back to Sherwood, I guess that'd be the appeal of forest dwelling losers and the sadistic sheriffs who love them err... hate them.
 
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The main thing I would add is to never trap yourself writing something you're not interested in writing. I've tried to contort plots and characters into something I thought the story was "supposed" to be like only to find a bunch of awkward garbage in its place. Let the story decide who is the bad guy and who is the good guy based on the way you want to write the characters, not the way they're "supposed" to be.
 
If a character interests me, then they are easier to write, if not then it is like peeling an apple with my fingernails.
 
I don't think I have bad guys and good guys anymore ... just a lot of characters who pave a bloody road to you-know-where with good intentions. Everyone is a protagonist in their own mind.

I admit though, the characters with the wildest dark sides are the most fun to write, although they are not necessarily bad guys. Who the reader sympathizes with depends on their own transference. I had one reader who loved a particular character, another who thought she was a total b*tch. The story works either way.
 
Why NOT write the book with the villian as protagonist then? It would be different and interesting to read.
 
PulpHero said:
I've been slowly working on a story for about a year now which includes a flawed hero and a somewhat noble villain.

I actually had to reboot and rethink my story recently because I discovered I was writing more about the villain than the hero. The hero was meant to be emotionally flawed and self centered for most of the story, but eventually he learns to change and turn around his motivations. But I was having so much fun writing the villain as chasing him, that I kept pushing the hero's turnaround back, and eventually I had an emotionally oppressed, badass villain looking for redemption versus a hero that went past "anti-hero" and straight into "asshole" territory.

Anyone else like writing more for badguys than goodguys?
Click to expand...

The last time I did that it was something like a really sick video nasty involving torture and canniblism for a Freddy Krueger/Jason Vorhees style character, another story I did involved an normally benevolent rattlesnake godess (one of the good guys) who was provoked and my usual good guys're
psychotic but it depends on the circumstances really.
 
Jon Sprunk said:
Sometimes, yeah. Villians often have the advantage of being unambiguous in their motivations. They want what they want and they want it now. Modern heroes, on the other hand, need to be three-dimentional, and creating a fully-realized character on paper is no easy task.

So, villains are usually more fun to write.
Click to expand...

You don't want to know about one of mine called Scaleback..
 
I have a really tough time writing villains, I just can´t get their motivation. Maybe I put too much down into their motives but I just hate the bad guy who is just bad for the sake of being bad. So for me, 'good' guys are alot easier to write.
 
In my experience its good guys turning bad (In a tale of vengence I did, a giant eagle avenged the death of her adopted father by killin a MoD official) and it depends on the circumstances (It isn't science ficting but FALLING DOWN's a good example of somebody who only wants to see his daughter taking matters into his own hands) really. In something I'm working on a barbarian queen HAS to rely on an experienced but team of psycotic warriors who she knows and trusts to help her take out a demon to prevent a cataclysm. The said team were pushed into psychotic states by the circumstances and like the team leader says 'sometimes to do this job you've got to be a bastard/become like them just to stay alive. So the heros sometime have no choice to become anti-heros.
And then theres always some bureuacrat (getting some sexual thrill out of 'its the rules/only doing their job/ following proceedures, formalities and regulations and doesn't give a s**t about the possible cataclysm) and generally being some obnoxious wanker/jobsworth only caring aout company profits..
 
I don't think of my characters as heroes and villains. I think of them as protagonists and antagonists. My antagonists are simply characters in opposition to the protag. On occasion, some are rather villainous because they're selfish, self-centered people, but they often do the wrong things for a reason that makes sense to them which brings them up against the protag who's trying to do the right things for the right reasons. Both types of characters are complex. The ones easiest for me to write are the ones who interest me the most, so I try to make all my characters interesting to me. :)
 
I must confess, in my first novel, the main protagonist was the main antagonist too. He was violent and controlling, but he had his reasons for being so. I found it rather interesting to see (for want of a better word) 'normal' people trying to deal with that.

As to whether it's any easier to write for the bad guys or not, I couldn't really say, as it probably differs from person to person. But I will say this; no matter how white as the driven snow you (or rather, your characters) are, there's always a dark streak somewhere within. Nobody's perfect, we all do bad things, including heroes and villains.
CB
 
My favorite "villains" so far are those created by Jules Verne. There are two versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that I like with Captain Nemo- the one from the late-50's with James Mason and the one from the early-2000's with Michael Caine. Also, the Robur character from the American International flick Master of the World acted by Vincent Price. In all these cases, the so-called "bad guy" really has something to say. He's got a nobel purpose. Nemo, who is driven by personal tragedy, is on a one-man-war to destroy civilization's oppression of other men. Robur wants to use his superweapon, a heliostate (which is a kind of cross between a Zepline and a helicopter) to bully the goverments of the world to give up the practice of making war on each other. Both Nemo and Robur are the villains of their stories, but you can't help but agree with a lot of what they are saying and you can't help but agree with some of their goals. It makes for a very interesting villain.

Right now, I'm trying to write a story where an immortal Gilgamesh has turned up in the jungles of South America and he's a villain with a nobel purpose. So, it's up to me now to figure out what is the pure theme of the Epic of Gilgamesh and give my "villain" that twisted nobel purpose.
 
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